Food scare

Spicy

The biggest food scare since the last one is less frightening than it looks

SUDAN 1 is a red dye used to colour polishes, waxes and solvents. It isn't meant to be used in food, and has been banned as an additive in the European Union since 1995. That is because some people think it causes cancer. So when traces of it were found in a batch of Worcester sauce made by Premier Foods, British newspapers were not slow to alert their readers to the dangers of filling up their supermarket trolleys with carcinogens. The source of trouble was a contaminated batch of chilli powder, which went into Premier's Worcester sauce. That in turn was added to over 400 food products, which are now being recalled. It has already been labelled “the biggest food scare since BSE”. But how scary is it?

Sudan 1 is a genotoxic carcinogen, which means that it can permanently alter the DNA in, say, a human liver cell. The study that links Sudan 1 to cancerous tumours was done in America 20 years ago. It found that when rats and mice were fed 30mg of Sudan 1 for each kilogram of their bodyweight every day for two years, the rats underwent changes that indicated they were on the way to getting tumours. The mice were okay. The study was peer reviewed, but was never replicated. When the International Agency for Research on Cancer looked at the data, it decided it was not robust enough to categorise Sudan 1 as a likely cause of cancer, says Alan Boobis, a toxicologist at Imperial College, London. He likens the risk of getting cancer from the affected food products to that from smoking one cigarette in a lifetime.

If an average-sized man, who weighed 80kg (12½ stone), volunteered to test the effects of Sudan 1 on humans, he would have to consume 2.4 grams of the dye a day to match the dose given to the rats. According to the Food Standards Agency (FSA), there are 3mg of Sudan 1 in every litre of the contaminated Worcester sauce. So our man would have to drink around 800 litres of Worcester sauce every day for two years. That's an awful lot of Bloody Marys.

Even though there is little evidence that the dye is a killer, does the fact that an illegal substance was found mean that Britain's food-safety system is faulty? Not according to Sue Dibb of the National Consumer Council, who says that controls have been tightened up since the mad-cow crisis. Since 2003, for example, all chilli imported into the EU has had to be certified as free of Sudan 1. The offending batch apparently came in before then. And in January, an EU directive which obliges producers to know where their ingredients come from and to whom they are sold became law. That's how the FSA was able to compile such a long list of products, ranging from shepherd's pies to salad dressings, which contained the Worcester sauce. It then recalled them swiftly: the FSA received the information on February 14th, and the recall started on the 18th.

Food has probably never been safer (see chart). But a headline that reads, “food recalled—health risks minimal” will probably not sell many papers.